


Gibbet

by PrettyArbitrary



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Witchcraft, Gen, Ghost Jack, POV Second Person, Witch Gabriel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-26
Updated: 2019-10-26
Packaged: 2021-01-04 01:35:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21189368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrettyArbitrary/pseuds/PrettyArbitrary
Summary: It’s over, finally, all the suffering and the dying, and you hang in a metal cage in chains, as if they’re afraid even now you’ll crawl back into your meat and tear free and come for them. They were always afraid. Afraid of the consequences of their own actions most of all.But there’s no rest for you. No proper burial, nor a wake neither.





	Gibbet

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by Marshy's amazing art: <https://twitter.com/marshedblob/status/1187776105459019777?s=09>
> 
> About the POV... Sometimes you just have to try new things.

It’s over, finally, all the suffering and the dying, and you hang in a metal cage in chains, as if they’re afraid even now you’ll crawl back into your meat and tear free and come for them. They were always afraid. Afraid of the consequences of their own actions most of all.

But there’s no rest for you. No proper burial, nor a wake neither. No candle burnt through the night to guide your spirit home. You hang here, in your cage and your chains, with the souls of the living passing by on every side, and not a one of them pauses to say a blessing or a prayer for you. Oh, some of them cry—you think they cry, it’s not your ears you hear with now—and more than one fight breaks out, and you can smell the red blood left to lie on the living earth after, taunting and tormenting as the bit of life in it soaks home into the mother earth. Where you can never go, for you weren’t shrived.

You burned your life for them, end to end, to see justice done for them, to see the murderers and monsters in power got their due, and in the end there’s not justice nor peace. You think you understand the restless dead. You think you might be one of them.

But then someone stops. A soul that shines different from the others, that calls to you. There’s no peace in it, either, and you hear the words it whispers. “Don't fret. I've got plans to you, your story isn't over yet.”

It’s a promise. You can feel the oath-force of the words.

You hang, and wait. 

It’s terrible to be a restless spirit. You feel the turning of the sun and stars, but time has lost meaning. Every day is an eternity. But worse is the way that those turnings grate like sand in the gears of your being. Every uncountable moment passing is a reminder that there have been, will be, an eternity more of them. That there is no escape from this, no peace that can ever be within your grasp through your own power.

Maybe they were right to chain you. Maybe, with a little more time, you will find a way to crawl back into your meat and rip free of your cage and come for the ones who did this. For all of them, the ones who left them to do it and the ones who didn’t bless you or burn a candle or tear you out of here to lay your bones to rest in hallowed ground.

Maybe the only reason you don’t is because of that promise. You cling to it, like a rope cast to a drowning man, and clutch your sanity close as the endless minutes scrape away at your sense of self.

It’s night when that soul returns. You can feel the movement of the heavens—the moon dark in the sky, the stars and seasons aligned. The mortal world feels just a hand-span away. If you just stretch…

You feel it when the cage is ripped open and your bones fall to the soothing earth. But it doesn’t accept you. You feel it when the flesh that clings to your corpse is slashed open and hands dig into you—you feel it as if you were alive, and you scream in pain, howl at the desecration. With raw fury shaped like claws, you lash at the offending soul, only to be stunned to stillness when it calls your name.

“Jack Morrison, I’m here to keep my promise.”

Promise? Yes, you remember the promise. But this is no promise, this is defilement. This is agony. How much do you have to suffer?

“Jack Morrison. You’ll be free soon, but I need a bone to call you back.”

He cuts more, opening your ribs, cutting at the ligaments to wrench one free. You twist and snarl, the pain like barbed wire wrapped around and around you. You don’t attack. He knows your name. When he speaks it, it feels like being given back to yourself.

And then, with a slash of his knife across the thick cables of your arteries, he wrenches your heart free from your body. Agony erases you for a single almost blessed second, and then...he is holding you in the palm of his hand. Warm, alive, thumping with a heartbeat all around your cold still self. 

He walks away from the rotting meat on the ground that once mattered to you. You follow, because he carries you with him.

The world to your eyes is souls and spirits, thresholds and crossroads, and the slow rotation of the earth and heavens. At a crossroads, he walks widdershins three times before turning off the paths to cut across the moor. You think that if he weren’t carrying you, you would have lost him then, and maybe that’s the point. On the periphery of your senses, enormous things move in the shadows of Creation. Things that might swallow such a small fierce light as you whole. You huddle closer to him, taking shelter in his living aura.

He laughs softly and strokes you, the brush of his hand across your heart caressing throughout your being. “You’re safe, don’t worry. Soon enough, you’ll be the one they flee from.”

You feel it before you reach it: a circle of standing stones, each one glowing dully in your senses with a rooted solidity that flows together to create a threshold that daunts you. Your keeper, alive and not answerable to such forces, blithely steps across it. Because he carries you with him, you go too. 

In the center, he sets down your rib atop a pile of things you can’t identify except that they are charmed. You can recognize also the knife he pulls out, which shines with power that matches his soul. He holds it up in one hand above the pile, and your heart in the other.

He drives the knife down, and you convulse as it pierces your heart, into his hand. The mingled blood from both drips, your entire being falling in the shape of those drops, onto your rib and the things it lies with.

“Jack Morrison,” he calls, and his voice echoes to the edges of the threshold. “Wake.”

Three times named. The summoning grips you. You convulse again, writhing with the bones and blood and dust, the cursed candle and blessed water. You writhe, all of it of a piece, all of it _you_, as you’re born again, soul called back to retake its shape, wrapping the mortal elements around the bone of your old body to forge a new one.

You lie spread-eagled, gasping and breathing, body vibrating with pain and pleasure and shock at the sheer existence of sensation, naked in the dirt beneath the black star-dusted sky. You claw your fingers, dig them into the grass and the soil. You look up at the soul—the man—who did this thing. He smiles down, face shadowed beneath the wide brim of his hat but teeth glinting.

“My name is Gabriel,” he says. With the hand that held the knife, he reaches down and helps you up. The soles of your feet still rest on the earth, and it’s a relief. It’s an anchor, like the air’s cold fingers resting against your skin.

He’s of a height with you. His hair is long and dark and gleams under the starlight, and his eyes shine with the power of his soul. In their light, he’s dark of skin and beautiful and savage with a restlessness akin to your own.

You are still a restless spirit, even cloaked in flesh. His hand is still wrapped around your heart, and you still feel his grip on you. You feel the drip and mingling of his blood and yours. 

“I was dead,” you tell him. You’re not sure if it’s a protest, disbelief, or simply an observation.

“But you weren’t beyond pain.” As long as he has your heart, he’ll hold power over you. But you’ll be beyond the power of anyone else, to kill or lay to rest. He puts it away somewhere on his person, and takes out a cloth to wrap his wounded hand. After a breath of watching him fumble one-handed, you reach out to help. “This is better than being left to hang in the gibbet, isn’t it?”

You nod. It’s true.

“Do you know what I want?” Gabriel asks, his eyes burning like barrow flames. You shake your head. “I want to see those monsters hang where you were.”

Your enemies in life. Their greed consumed your people. You raised the banner for all those they’d stolen from, persecuted, driven out from their homes or taken from their loved ones. You’d been unafraid, and determined to see them cast down, and the wounded and angry had flocked.

Perhaps somewhere, they still flock. But not to you, anymore.

Memories of faces flit through your memory. You frown. “You weren’t one of us. You weren’t in the resistance.”

Gabriel laughs. “No, not me. My kind weren’t the types you would have welcomed. But it isn’t over yet. You may have lost your mortal army, but the night children are fighting, whether anyone wants us or not. Would you like to see their faces when we raise a dead man’s banner against them?”

The restless dead can be laid with a good burial, completion of a task left undone, or through vengeance for the wrong done to them. You think about the scrape of time wearing away your soul, a particle of self at a time. You think about your heart in his hand, his weapon, unkillable and inescapable.

You smile, and the starlight glints on your teeth.


End file.
